Innovation workgroups, advisory boards / brains trusts, longitudinal studies, elite user / opinion leader research…

Unlike an online community or interactive panel, an e-council is a cherry-picked group of 60-150 participants, who meet within a powerful online research environment specifically designed to support collaboration, co-creation, and social bonding. To ensure success, an e-council must have a clear, collective goal, in which both sponsor and participants have a vested interest (e.g. product, service, or brand development / improvement). Ideally, there should also be a potent incentive for participants to exchange ideas and opinions (e.g. shared interest, job focus), and a commitment from the client sponsors to participate. Tasks and questions are semi-structured, moderated, and follow a clear schedule, so commitment is undemanding. For these reasons e-councils are ideal for innovation projects involving specialist groups, brains trusts, elite users, or opinion leaders, where participants have time to absorb the corporate perspective, and explore subject areas, exhaustively, and from all angles.

In contrast to traditional research, e-councils enable a relationship between you and your participants which is genuinely evolving and reciprocal, and where both parties benefit from mutual understanding and the improvements that result from the dialogue. On a more practical level, e-councils offer you a direct, continuous, cost-effective, communication channel to target groups globally, a rapid feedback mechanism, and positive word-of-mouth about your business / organisation and any goals you’ve achieved together.

The nqual team are recognised thought-leaders in e-council design and administration, having achieved an unbroken string of successes for blue chips and the public sector, including sites for Microsoft, O2, The NHS, and The Healthcare Commission. We have e-council pricing options to suit any budget, ranging from entry-level hosted projects, through to fully branded, bespoke online research communities, and designed to make it easy for you to upgrade, or grow your solution, without disturbing your community. All of our e-council solutions are based on our netfluential™ platform, are fully secure and highly adaptable, and include e-forums, e-diaries, polls, file exchange, and social networking features. You can participate in your e-council from anywhere in the world, and our moderators will update you with regular, ongoing synopses of site activity, themes, and discussions, on an ongoing basis.